


Poe Party Oneshots

by schuylers



Category: Edgar Allan Poe's Murder Mystery Dinner Party (Web Series)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 18:06:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10645218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schuylers/pseuds/schuylers
Summary: Whilst I write new things, I'm going to be uploading various oneshots that I've poted to tumblr (or brand new ones)!Stay tuned for more.





	Poe Party Oneshots

Prison wasn’t as glamorous as Charlotte had expected.

Of course, she hadn’t expected it to be glamorous in the first place. But she often found herself wondering about the lifestyle. Perhaps they were hiding some wonderful secret in the prisons - perhaps she could write a book about it.

She was quite wrong.

She paced her cell for the fifty third time that day, raking a hand through her hair, which was straggling and graying faster than she thought. She couldn’t see herself for there was no mirror.

So, instead, I will paint a picture of her for you.

She wore a heavy pinafore, black in colour and coated in a thick layer of grime from the cell floor. Her grimy pinafore was tattered and filthy. The eldest Bronte sister’s cheeks had hollowed considerably and her clothes seemed to hang more and more from her frame as her weight deteriorates more and more. She once had a cloth bonnet, but it was soon discarded and left to fester in a damp corner of the small room.

The dark circles that rung Charlotte’s sunken eyes weren’t the product of nightmares, nor were they from simply a lack of sleep. As Charlotte had grown to understand, all actions had consequences. Therefore, all consequences must have had an action.

The action leading to Charlotte’s shadowed eyes was in the form of one Fyodor Dostoyevsky. _Ghostly_ form was a better description.

Charlotte had never thought this would happen. After all, that insufferable, caustic fool of a ghost, Lenore didn’t seem to haunt Poe for anything. Just thinking about her made Charlotte shudder - she was the epitome of everything she hated. How imprudent it was of her to fall in love as she did. The girl needed to learn that the people she loved would die and decide to accept it. In order to fully immerse herself in her ice queen demeanor she could have to disassociate herself with love. It simply wasn’t going to happen. Charlotte was getting ahead of herself here, mentally giving life advice to not only a ghost, but one of her mortal enemies. Still, she couldn’t help but think of Lenore on a day to day basis. She was almost as naive as that Annabel Lee.

 _Enough of these trivial thoughts._ Charlotte told herself - perhaps she spoke it, perhaps she didn’t. The only sounds she heard over the past months were the sound of metal on metal and her own breathing and she was recently finding it hard to discern whether her thoughts were kept to herself or vocalised. _Those idiots mean nothing anymore. Especially not Annabel Lee._

No matter how many times she vowed to stop thinking about the fellow guests at Poe’s dismal party, her mind always wandered back to the other two women - the visitors who lasted longer than most. Annabel was a highly popular subject within Charlotte’s mind - her mannerisms and speech patterns were strange, almost mesmerising. The girl was quite pretty, she could say that, yet she seemed far from conceited and self-obsessed. She was too kind for her own good - which of course, lead to her downfall. That was partly Charlotte’s fault, but _she_ never told Eddie to murder her. That was his own idea. Charlotte just… heavily condoned it.

She thought that if anyone were to haunt her it would be Annabel Lee, or perhaps Mary Shelley - for they had formed an odd sort of bond during their brief time at Poe’s dinner and - if she were a ghost - surely she would wish to seek revenge for the false friendship Charlotte had kindled.  Charlotte would even go so far to speculate over H.G Wells coming to torment her, after Anne, Eddie and she had destroyed his blossoming relationship.

If it is not quite clear already, Charlotte Bronte never expected Fyodor Dostoyevsky to haunt her. Though once it had actually happened, it seemed foolish for her to have missed it.

Dostoyevsky didn’t haunt as one would expect. For starters, he tiptoed around Charlotte’s cell as if he was going to wake her - not that Charlotte was sleeping of course, seeing the ghostly figure of the man she murdered bumble around was enough to ensure that. He would float ever so slightly above the ground and recite his works.

Paragraphs after paragraphs of his works - all in Russian.

If this wasn’t a big enough torture for her crimes, Charlotte didn’t know what was. She suspected that the ghost knew exactly what he as doing, exactly how he was scaring her.

_You should never be afraid of the dead, Charlotte. We all die, after all._

“Shut up, Anne!” She cried, spinning around, her dress shifting with her. It took Charlotte a few seconds to realise her sister was not in the cell with her, and she was simply imagining a voice more animated than that of the the monotonous reciting of her resident ghost.

“Shut up…” She whispered to herself. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!” Her voice grew steadily louder as she turned to face Dostoyevsky, who had paused in his rendering to watch her curiously. “Shut up!”

She was sobbing now, great, terrible wails that shook her body, tear tracks tracing semi-clean trails down her dirty cheeks. When she sunk to the ground, the weight of her skirt dragged her down almost too quickly, just another tiny detail that drew Charlotte to the brink of insanity.

Everyone was to die. But did that excuse Charlotte from anything she’d done? Did that mean she would be stuck with ghosts and guilt and horrible, horrible thoughts for the rest of her life?

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair.

Dostoyevsky watched, with a look of most intense concentration on his face - Charlotte had been broken, and his work in the dusty prison cell was finally over.

He stepped backwards, and let the stone walls swallow him up.


End file.
